Spiritual Soul Instructions and Observation of the World

Schmidt Number: S-0722

On-line since: 31st March, 2014

Course II - Lecture II

The Epistemological Basisof Theosophy II

GA 52

Berlin
December 4, 1903

With the remark that the present, in particular the German
philosophy and its epistemology makes it difficult to its supporters to find
access to the theosophical world view I have started these talks before eight
days, and I added that I try to outline this theory of knowledge, this present
philosophical world view and to show how somebody with an absolutely serious
conscience in this direction finds it hard to be a theosophist.

On the whole, the theories of knowledge
which developed from Kantianism are excellent and absolutely correct. However,
one cannot understand from their point of view how the human being can find
out anything about beings, generally about real beings which are different from
him. The consideration of Kantianism has shown us that this view comes to the
result in the end that everything that we have round ourselves is appearance,
is only our mental picture. What we have round ourselves is no reality, but
it is controlled by the laws which we ourselves prescribe to our surroundings.
I said: as we must see with coloured glasses the whole world in this colour
nuance, in the same way the human being must see the world — after Kant’s
view — coloured as he sees them according to his organisation no matter
how it may be in the external reality. That is why we are not allowed to speak
of a “thing-in-itself,” but only of the quite subjective world of
appearance. If this is the case, everything that surrounds me — the table,
the chairs et cetera, is an image of my mind; because they all are there for
me only, in so far as I perceive them, in so far as I give form to these perceptions
according to the law of my own mind, prescribe the laws to them.

I cannot state whether still anything
exists except for my perception of the table and the chairs. This is basically
the result of Kant’s philosophy in the end. This is not compatible, of
course, with the fact that we can penetrate into the true nature of the things.
Theosophy is inseparable from the view that we can penetrate not only into the
physical existence of the things, but also into the spiritual of the things;
that we have knowledge not only of that which surrounds us physically, but that
we can also have experiences of that which is purely spiritual.

I want to show you how a vigorous
book of the world view which is called “theosophy” today represents
that which became Kantianism later. I read up a passage of the book that was
written a short time before Kantianism was founded. It appeared in 1766. It
is a book which — we can say it absolutely that way — could be written
by a theosophist. The view is represented in it that the human being has not
only a relationship to the physical world surrounding him, but that it would
be proved scientifically one day that the human being belongs also to a spiritual
world, and that also the way of being together with it could be scientifically
proved. Something is well demonstrated that one could assume that it is proved
more or less or that it is proved in future: “I do not know where or when
that the human soul is in relation to others that they have effect on each other
and receive impressions from each other. The human being is not aware of that,
however, as long as everything is good.” Then another passage: “Indeed,
it does not matter whichever ideas of the other world we have, and, hence, any
thinking about spirit does not penetrate to a state of spirit at all ...”
and so on.

The human being with his average
mental capacity cannot realise the spirit; but it is said that one can assume
such a common life with a spiritual world. With such a view Kant’s epistemology
is not compatible. He who wrote the foundation of this view is Immanuel Kant
himself. That means that we have to register a reversal in Kant himself. Because
he writes this in 1766, and fourteen years later he founds that theory of knowledge
which makes it impossible to find the way to theosophy. Our modern philosophy
is based on Kantianism. It has taken on different forms, those from Herbart
and Schopenhauer to Otto Liebmann and Johannes Volkelt
and Friedrich Albert Lange. We find more or less Kantian coloured
epistemology everywhere according to which we deal only with phenomena, with
our subjective world of perception, so that we cannot penetrate to the being,
to the root of the “thing-in-itself.”

At first I would like to bring forward
to you everything that developed in the course of the 19th century, and what
we can call the modified epistemology of Kant. I would like to demonstrate how
the current epistemology developed which looks with a certain arrogance at somebody
who believes that one can know something. I want to show how somebody forms
a basic epistemological view whose kind of view is based on Kant. Everything
that science has brought seems to verify the Kantian epistemology. It seems
to be so firm that one cannot escape from it. Today we want to roll up it and
next time we want to see how one can find the way with it.

First of all physics seems to teach
us everywhere that that is no reality the naive human being believes that it
is reality. Let us take the tone. You know that the oscillation of the air is
there outside our organ, outside our ear which hears the tone. What takes place
outside us is an oscillation of the air particles. Only because this oscillation
comes to our ear and sets the eardrum swinging the movement continues to the
brain. There we perceive what we call tone and sound. The whole world would
be silent and toneless; only because the external movement of our ear is taken
up by the ear, and that which is only an oscillation is transformed; we experience
what we feel as a sound world. Thus the epistemologist can easily say: tone
is only what exists in you, and if you imagine it without this, nothing but
moved air is there.

The same applies to the colours
and the light of the external world. The physicist has the view that colour
is an oscillation of the ether which fulfils the whole universe. Just as the
air is set swinging by the sound and nothing else than the movement of the air
exists if we hear a sound, light is only an oscillatory movement of the ether.
The ether oscillations are a little bit different from those of the air. The
ether oscillates vertically to the direction of the propagation of the waves.
This is made clear by experimenting physics. If we have the colour sensation
“red,” we have to do it with a sensation. Then we must ask ourselves:
what is there if no feeling eye exists? — It should be nothing else of
the colours in space than oscillatory ether. The colour quality is removed from
the world if the feeling eye is removed from the world.

What you see as red is 392 to 454
trillions oscillations, with violet 751 to 757 trillions oscillations. This
is inconceivably fast. Physics of the 19th century transformed any light sensation
and colour sensation into oscillations of the ether. If no eye were there, the
whole colour world would not exist. Everything would be pitch-dark. One could
not talk about colour quality in the outer space. This goes so far that Helmholtz
said: we have the sensations of colour and light, of sound and tone in ourselves.
This is not even like that which takes place without us. We are even not allowed
to use an image of that which takes place without us. — What we know as
a colour quality of red is not similar to about 420 trillions oscillations per
second. Therefore, Helmholtz means: what really exists in our consciousness
is not an image but a mere sign.

Physics has maintained that space
and time exist as I perceive them. The physicist imagines that a movement in
space takes place if I have a colour sensation. It is the same with the time
image if I have the sensation red and the sensation violet. Both are subjective
processes in me. They follow each other in time. The oscillations follow each
other outside. Physics does not go so far as Kant. Whether the “things-in-themselves”
are space-filled whether they are in space or follow each other in time, we
cannot know — in terms of Kant; but we know only: we are organised this
and that way, and, therefore, something — may it be spatial or not —
has to take on spatial form. We spread out this form over that. For physics
the oscillatory movement has to take place in space, it has to take a certain
time ... The ether oscillates, we say, 480 trillions times per second. This
includes the images of space and time already. The physicist assumes space and
time being without us. However, the rest is only a mental picture, is subjective.
You can read in physical works that for somebody who has realised what happens
in the outside world nothing exists than oscillatory air, than oscillatory ether.
Physics seems to have contributed that everything that we have exists only within
our consciousness and except this nothing exists.

The second that the science of the
19th century can present to us is the reasons which physiology delivers. The
great physiologist Johannes Müller found the law of the
specific nerve energy. According to this law any organ reacts with a particular
sensation. If you push the eye, you can perceive a gleam of light; if electricity
penetrates it, also. The eye answers to any influence from without in such a
way as it just corresponds to it. It has the strength from within to answer
with light and colour. If light and ether penetrate, the eye answers with light
and colour sensations.

Physiology still delivers additional
building stones to prove what the subjective view has put up. Imagine that we
have a sensation of touch. The naive human being imagines that he perceives
the object. But what does he perceive really? The epistemologist asks. What
is before me is nothing else than a combination of the smallest particles, of
molecules. They are in movement. Every particle is in such movement which cannot
be perceived by the senses because the oscillations are too small. Basically
it is nothing else than the movement only which I can perceive, because the
particle is not able to creep into me. What is it if you put the hand on the
body? The hand carries out a movement. This continues down to the nerve and
the nerve transforms it into a sensation: in heat and cold, in softy and hard.
Also in the outside world movements are included, and if my sense of touch is
concerned, the organ transforms it into heat or cold, into softness or hardness.

We cannot even perceive what happens
between the body and us, because the outer skin layer is insensible. If the
epidermis is without a nerve, it can never feel anything. The epidermis is always
between the thing and the body. The stimulus has an effect from a relatively
far distance through the epidermis. Only what is excited in your nerve can be
perceived. The outer body remains completely without the movement process. You
are separated from the thing, and what you really feel is produced within the
epidermis. Everything that can really penetrate into your consciousness happens
in the area of the body, so that it is still separated from the epidermis. We
would have to say after this physiological consideration that we get in nothing
of that which takes place in the outside world, but that it is merely processes
within our nerves which continue in the brain which excite us by quite unknown
external processes. We can never reach beyond our epidermis. You are in your
skin and perceive nothing else than what happens within it.

Let us go over to another sense,
to the eye, from the physical to the physiological. You see that the oscillations
propagate; they have to penetrate our body first. The eye consists of a skin,
the cornea, first of all. Behind this is the lens and behind the lens the vitreous
body. There the light has to go through. Then it arrives at the rear of the
eye which is lined with the retina. If you removed the retina, the eye would
never transform anything into light. If you see forms of objects, the rays have
to penetrate into your eye first, and within the eye a small retina picture
is outlined. This is the last that the sensation can cause. What is before the
retina is insensible; we have no real perception of it. We can only perceive
the picture on the retina. One imagines that there chemical changes of the visual
purple take place. The effect of the outer object has to pass the lens and the
vitreous body, then it causes a chemical change in the retina, and this becomes
a sensation. Then the eye puts the picture again outwardly, surrounds itself
with the stimuli which it has received, and puts them again around in the world
without us. What takes place in our eye is not that which forms the stimulus,
but a chemical process. The physiologists always deliver new reasons for the
epistemologists. Apparently we have to agree with Schopenhauer completely if
he says: the starry heaven is created by us. It is a reinterpretation of the
stimuli. We can know nothing about the “thing-in-itself.”

You see that this epistemology limits
the human being merely to the things, we say to the mental pictures which his
consciousness creates. He is enclosed in his consciousness. He can suppose —
if he wants — that anything exists in the world which makes impression
on him. In any case nothing can penetrate into him. Everything that he feels
is made by him. We cannot even know from anything that takes place in the periphery.
Take the stimulus in the visual purple. It has to be directed to the nerve,
and this has to be transformed anyhow into the real sensation, so that the whole
world which surrounds us would be nothing else than what we would have created
from our inside.

These are the physiological proofs
which induce us to say that this is that way. However, there are also people
who ask now why we can assume other human beings besides us whom we, nevertheless,
recognise only from the impressions which we receive from them. If a human being
stands before me, I have only oscillations as stimuli and then an image of my
own consciousness. It is only a presupposition that except for the consciousness
picture something similar to the human being exists. Thus the modern epistemology
supports its view that the outer content of experience is merely of subjective
nature. It says: what is perceived is exclusively the content of the own consciousness,
is a change of this content of consciousness. Whether there are things-in-themselves,
is beyond our experience. The world is a subjective appearance to me which is
built up from my sensations consciously or unconsciously. Whether there are
also other worlds, is beyond the field of my experience.

When I said: it is beyond the field
of experience whether there is another world, it also beyond the field of experience
whether there are still other human beings with other consciousnesses, because
nothing of a consciousness of the other human beings can get into the human
being. Nothing of the world of images of another human being and nothing of
the consciousness of another human being can come into my consciousness. Those
who have joined Kant’s epistemology have this view.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte
also joined this view in his youth. He thought Kant’s theory thoroughly.
There may be no nicer description of that than those which Fichte gave in his
writing On the Determination of the Human Being (1800). He says in
it: “nowhere anything permanent exists, not without me not within me,
but there is only a continuous transformation. I nowhere know any being, and
also not my own. There is no being. — I myself do not know at all, and
I am not. Images are there: they are the only things that exist, and they know
about themselves in the way of images — images which pass without anything
existing that they pass; which are connected with images to images. Images which
do not contain anything, without any significance and purpose. I myself am one
of these images; yes, I myself am not this, but only a confused image of the
images.”
Indeed — if you stick to the view that you deal in your subjective opinion
only with the things of your own consciousness, then you must get inevitably
to the view that you do not know more about yourselves than about the outside
world. If you go over to the image of the own ego, then you do not have more
of it than of the outside world. Keep this thought in mind in its full significance,
then it becomes clear to you that the outside world dissolves in a sum of hallucinations,
and that also the inside world is nothing else than a creation of subjective
dreams fitted together. You can imagine already from the outside, I would like
to say, from the corporeality that also you yourselves like the outside world
are nothing else than dream images or illusions if you interpret the view correctly.

Look at your hand which transforms
your movements to sensations of touch. This hand is nothing else than a creation
of my subjective consciousness, and my whole body and what is in me is also
a creation of my subjective consciousness. Or I take my brain: if I could investigate
under the microscope how the sensation came into being in the brain, I would
have nothing before myself than an object which I have to transform again to
an image in my consciousness.

The idea of the ego is also an image;
it is generated like any other. Dreams pass me, illusions pass me — this
is the world view of illusionism which appears inevitably as the last consequence
of Kantianism. Kant wanted to overcome the old dogmatic philosophy; he wanted
to overcome what has been brought forward by Wolff and his school. He considered
this as a sum of figments.

These were the proofs of freedom,
of the will, of the immortality of the soul and of God’s existence which
Kant exposed concerning their probative value as figments. What does he give
as proofs? He proved that we can know nothing about a “thing-in-itself”
that that which we have is only contents of consciousness that, however, God
must be “something-in-itself.” Thus we cannot necessarily prove
the existence of God according to Kant. Our reason, our mind is only applicable
to that which is given in the perception. They are only there to prescribe laws
of perception and, hence, the matters: God — soul — will —
are completely outside our rational knowledge. Reason has a limit, and it is
not able to overcome it.

In the preface of the second edition
of Critique of Pure Reason he says at a passage: “I had to cancel
knowledge to make room for faith.” He wanted this basically. He wanted
to limit knowledge to sense-perception, and he wanted to achieve everything
that goes beyond reason in other way. He wanted to achieve it on the way of
moral faith. Hence, he said: in no way science can arrive at the objective existence
of the things one day. But we find one thing in ourselves: the categorical imperative
which appears with an unconditional obligation in us. — Kant calls it
a divine voice. It is beyond the things, it is accompanied by unconditional
moral necessity. From here Kant ascends to regain that for faith which he annihilates
for knowledge. Because the categorical imperative deals with nothing that is
caused by any sensory effect, but appears in us, something must exist that causes
the senses as well as the categorical imperative, and appears if all duties
of the categorical imperative are fulfilled. This would be blessedness. But
no one can find the bridge between both. Because he cannot find it, a divine
being has to build it. In doing so, we come to a concept of God which we can
never find with the senses.

A harmony between the sensory world
and the world of moral reason must be produced. Even if one did enough in a
life as it were, nevertheless, we must not believe that the earthly life generally
suffices. The human life goes beyond the earthly life because the categorical
imperative demands it. That is why we have to assume a divine world order. How
could the human being follow a divine world order, the categorical imperative,
if he did not have freedom? — Kant annihilated knowledge that way to get
to the higher things of the spirit by means of faith. We must believe! He tries
to bring in on the way of the practical reason again what he has thrown out
of the theoretical reason.

Those views which have no connection
apparently to Kant’s philosophy are also completely based on this philosophy.
Also a philosopher who had great influence — also in pedagogy: Herbart.
He had developed an own view from Kant’s critique of reason: if we look
at the world, we find contradictions there. Let us have a look at the own ego.
Today it has these mental pictures, yesterday it had others, tomorrow it will
have others again. What is this ego? It meets us and is fulfilled with a particular
image world. At another moment it meets us with another image world. We have
there a development, many qualities, and, nevertheless, it should be a thing.
It is one and many. Any thing is a contradiction. Herbart says that only contradictions
exist everywhere in the world. Above all we must reproach ourselves with the
sentence that the contradiction cannot be the true being. Now from it Herbart
deduces the task of his philosophy. He says: we have to remove the contradictions;
we have to construct a world without contradiction to us. The world of experiences
is an unreal one, a contradictory one. He sees the true sense, the true being
in transforming the contradictory world to a world without contradictions. Herbart
says: we find the way to the “thing-in-itself,” while we see the
contradictions, and if we get them out of us, we penetrate to the true being,
to true reality. — However, he also has this in common with Kant that
that which surrounds us in the outside world is mere illusion. Also he tried
in other way to support what should be valuable for the human being.

We come now, so to speak, to the
heart of the matter. Nevertheless, we must keep in mind that any moral action
makes only sense if there is reality in the world. What is any moral action
if we live in a world of appearance? You can never be convinced that that which
you do constitutes something real. Then any striving for morality and all your
goals are floating in the air. There Fichte was admirably consistent. Later
he changed his view and got to pure theosophy. With perception we can never
know about the world — he says — anything else than dreams of these
dreams. But something drives us to want the good. This lets us look into this
big world of dreams like in a flash. He sees the realisation of the moral law
in the world of dreams. The demands of the moral law should justify what reason
cannot teach. — And Herbart says: because any perception is full of contradictions,
we can never come to norms of our moral actions. Hence, there must be norms
of our moral actions which are relieved of any judgment by mind and reason.
Moral perfection, goodwill, inner freedom, they are independent of the activity
of reason. Because everything is appearance in our world, we must have something
in which we are relieved of reflection.

This is the first phase of the development
of the 19th century: the transformation of truth to a world of dreams. The idealism
of dreams was the only possible result of thinking about being and wanted to
make the foundation of a moral world view independent of all knowledge and cognition.
It wanted to limit knowledge to get room for faith. Therefore, the German philosophy
has broken with the ancient traditions of those world views which we call theosophy.
Anybody who calls himself theosophist could have never accepted this dualism,
this separation of moral and the world of dreams. It was for him always a unity,
from the lowest quantum of energy up to the highest spiritual reality. Because
as well as that which the animal accomplishes in desire and listlessness is
only relatively different from that which arises from the highest point of the
cultural life out of the purest motives, that is only relatively different everywhere
which happens below from that which happens on top. Kant left this uniform way
to complete knowledge and world view while he split the world in a recognisable
but apparent world and in a second world which has a quite different origin,
in the world of morality. In doing so, he clouded the look of many people. Anybody
who cannot find access to theosophy suffers from the aftermath of Kant’s
philosophy.

In the end, you will see how theosophy
emerges from a true theory of knowledge; however, it was necessary before that
I have demonstrated the apparently firm construction of science. Science seems
to have proved irrefutably that there are only the oscillations of the ether
if we feel green or blue that we sense tone by the aerial oscillations. The
contents of the next lecture will show how it is in reality.

Notes:

a vigorous book of the world view …: In
a satirical writing by I. Kant Dreams of a Spirit Seer Explained by
Dreams of Metaphysics (On Emanuel Swedenborg) (1766)